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During 2014 Alejandra Almada and I led various Universal Education activities in Argentina - 16 Guidelines and Transformative Mindfulness support groups in Epuyen and Trevelin respectively. Both groups will continue to work together and deepen their learning throughout 2015 and more activities are planned for adults.

Additionally, inspired by Montse Bolaños Arts and Ethics programme, I started delivering Arts and 16G workshops once a week to children aged between 6 and 11 years old in the local community youth centre. During the sessions I introduced mindfulness practices, the use of the Guidelines cards, storytelling, acting and small discussion groups. Activities also included role-playing, mural painting, working with clay, self-portraits and making puppets.

Expansive generosityI wanted to share with you the image in the header that came out of one of the mural projects that we worked on together with the 7- to 9-year-olds group. We were working on the concept of generosity so did a short mediation to explore its meaning, after which we started to expand our generosity towards others. So much did generosity expandthat it reached out to… aliens! So in the mural you can see a portrait of the aliens to whom the children’s generosity reached that day.

16 Guidelines superheroesWe also wrote stories about superheroes, ‘Protectors of the 16 Guidelines,’ and played being them throughout and in between the sessions, to take care of and promote positive values in daily life. It was a hugely inspiring and rewarding work that we hope to repeat this year.

Below you can see some of the characters fashioned by the children out of recycled materials: